


Maiden Strewments

by CorpseBrigadier



Series: Drinking For Days Gone By [21]
Category: Final Fantasy Tactics
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Dysfunctional Relationships, Emotional Manipulation, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-21
Updated: 2019-07-21
Packaged: 2020-07-10 05:23:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19900516
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CorpseBrigadier/pseuds/CorpseBrigadier
Summary: Things one thinks about while bleeding to death





	Maiden Strewments

**Author's Note:**

> **Note on Names:** I freely mix PSX and PSP names without remorse.

His eyes widened as he reeled back from his own wound, giving him the shocked appearance of an animal. In that instant King Delita seemed a cringing hound, a limed bird, an injured doe: every beast that a man might tame or hunt, every creature by which a man might blazon the embowered ladies of verse. She lay in the sunlit grass, blood and scattered blooms all around her. 

None of the poetry in that was lost on Ovelia now, and she smiled bitterly in remembrance of her wedding night and each cringing repetition that followed. His timorous subservience, his gentle "by your leaves"—every worshipful and completely feigned surrender. Had she determined to live out her days a maiden queen—to ornament the kingdom like a sterile flower, he would have permitted it. Had she asked him not to gaze on her until he'd slain the fabled Serpopard of Fovoham and played her chansons on a lyre strung with its guts, he would have done so. Had she demanded to choke the breath from his lips, he had convinced her that he would have offered it up as a sacrament. On the one occasion her hands encircled his throat, he had pulled them close until the bite of her nails had left his skin white and red. 

Every promise, every gift, every sacrifice—it had all been his means of mastery. This moment, though, this moment when he knelt stupid and shocked by a wound he could not anticipate or offer; this was hers. He was an idiot boy again watching a woman die, and she had the satisfaction of leaving him with an injury that no healer's art could mend. 

She smiled through the purpling foam that bubbled from her lips, and looked to a dimming sky that still burned too brightly to be twilight.

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the FFA prompt ["100 Words of Sadism"](https://fail-fandomanon.dreamwidth.org/374457.html?thread=2190893241#cmt2190893241)
> 
> * * *
> 
> **Fun Facts:** Title taken from the priest's commentary at Ophelia's funeral in _Hamlet_


End file.
